The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) (also referred to as AdvancedTCA) standard defines an open switch fabric based platform delivering an industry standard high performance, fault tolerant, and scalable solution for next generation telecommunications and data center equipment. The development of the ATCA standard is being carried out within the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG). The ATCA 3.0 base specification (January, 2003) defines the physical and electrical characteristics of an off-the-shelf, modular chassis based on switch fabric connections between hot-swappable blades. The Advanced TCA base specification supports multiple fabric connections, and multi-protocol support (i.e., Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, StarFabic, PCI Express, and RapidIO) including the Advanced Switching (AS) technology.
The ATCA 3.0 base specification defines the frame (rack) and shelf (chassis) form factors, core backplane fabric connectivity, power, cooling, management interfaces, and the electromechanical specification of the ATCA-compliant boards. The electromechanical specification is based on the existing IEC60297 EuroCard form factor, and enables equipment from different vendors to be incorporated in a modular fashion and be guaranteed to operate. The ATCA 3.0 base specification also defines a power budget of 200 Watts (W) per board, enabling high performance servers with multi-processor architectures and multi gigabytes of on-board memory.
Recently, the modularity of the ATCA architecture has been extended to another level, wherein multiple mezzanine cards (or modules) may be hosted by an ATCA carrier board. Proposed standards for the mezzanine cards/modules and related interfaces are defined by the Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC or AdvancedMC) specification, which is currently a proposed PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group specification (PICMG AMC.0) for hot-swappable, field-replaceable mezzanine cards. Optimized for packet-based, high-availability telecom systems, AMC cards can be attached to a variety of ATCA and proprietary carrier blades. AMCs communicate with the carrier card via a packet-based serial interface, which features up to 21 lanes of high-speed input/output (I/O) at 12.5 Gbit/sec each. The specification defines standard mezzanine module configuration for both full-height and half-height AMC cards, as well as single-width and double-width cards. AMC is slated to support a variety of protocols, including Ethernet, PCI Express, and Serial Rapid I/O. AMC also features integrated I2C- and Ethernet-based system management. AMC modules may also be employed for non-ATCA systems.